Projection mapping, in a projection system, is often a very complicated process due to the careful alignment of projectors required to align numerous two-dimensional (“2D”) projected images onto a three-dimensional (“3D”) physical object. The content to be projected is often crafted ahead of time, without access to the final projection mapping. Furthermore, the locations from where the projectors will be projecting are not known with any reasonable degree of accuracy. This naturally leads to warping being needed to align the desired imagery to the final projection surface. This warping process tackles the following problems as a whole: a. discrepancies from where the 2D content was intended to be projected and the final actual projector location; b. discrepancies between the 3D surface used to design the content and the final actual projection surface; and c. discrepancies between the ideal projection system used during content development and the final projector hardware (pixel aspect ratio, lens distortion, etc.).Without knowledge of the location of the projectors, the warping must be adjusted manually, for example by a technician setting up the projection system and/or the location of the projectors must be manually configured.
Indeed, it is often the case that the points described above aren't easily identified in the act of content creation. Ad-hoc projection mapping may simply have 2D content crafted using some notion of what the artist/content creator had in mind, and then made to fit when being projected. Hence, such ad-hoc projection mapping is generally performed after an odious manual set-up procedure, implemented by a technician operating the projection system to manually warp all the pixels in the projected images to achieve an overall alignment goal. If the projector moves relative to the 3D objects onto which images are being projected, the manual set-up procedure/manual warping needs to be repeated, with the technician again visiting the site to perform the warping, which can lead to down-time of the projection system. While some automatic systems exist for automatically performing warping onto three-dimensional objects, they generally work only for non-complex geometries. Alternatively, projector pose can be determined by manually by a technician dragging points manually onto an object, with back calculation being used to determine where projector is located, however this method suffers from the same problems as manual warping.